Classified Chop Suey
by bubblygoo
Summary: Bits and pieces from the lives of the Reikai Tantei. A series of Post-series drabbles, canon.
1. Refrigerator

Disclaimer: Yu Yu Hakusho belongs to its respective owners.

* * *

Yusuke should have been reborn as a sloth. Incredible power in those mandibles, impressive arms that could swing a maiden from a tree in three seconds flat, and absolutely no will to do the dishes. "He doesn't even try." Keiko's greeting from a late parent-teacher conference is a perfectly cooked bowl of ramen and a full sink. "I'm home!"

He left a note again on the refrigerator. She knew something had come up again, something had taken him away from this damn world and into the heaven known as the demon plane. "He must love it there. No wife to nag him, no objects that shouldn't be broken, and everyone's looking for a fight." There were benefits to marrying the bad boy, but they ended at college graduation.

"At least the food's hot." She tore down the note and dropped it in the trash. "It's not even six."

As she slurped her noodles and poured herself a glass of wine, she wondered what his bed in the demon world was like.


	2. Pinball

Hokushin and the monks never ate ramen. Yusuke had never seen a kitchen while in demon world, nor did he want to. "Keiko's pissed at me again." The monks maintained their grim expressions, and Yusuke pretended they were being supportive of him. "I bet she thinks I'm living it up here, that I'm having the time of my fucking life. But you boys know better, don't you?" Sitting on his throne, Yusuke felt like a tourist that had gone too far in Buckingham palace and still hadn't been caught by the guards. He wondered why there was still a throne here, when there was no longer a monarch. "Home sweet fucking home."

Hokushin brought up an impressively slim laptop up the steps and pulled out a small table to set it on. Yusuke never did get used to human technology in demon hands. "As you can see here, sire…"

"Yusuke."

"The food cultivation is doing quite well. These graphs show production rate, and these show as a population poll concerning favored alternative foods."

"If everything's going so well, why'd you call me?"

"We needed your consent to continue researching spirit generators."

"I consent. I consent. I consent."

"A-all right then. We also need your permission to—"

"Didn't you hear me? I gave my consent for research, government inspection squads, and distribution to the common market. That's all, right?"

"Well, yes, I suppose."

"Great. Next time, just email me. Now I've got an hour to kill before I can get back to human world. Does this thing have pinball?"


	3. Balloon

* * *

Mukuro's most closely guarded secret had nothing to do with her past. If she ever found out that Hiei had discovered it, he'd be lucky to get away with a punch through the gut.

"She gardens?"

"There's a small plot in the corner of the fortress that gets natural light. She's been trying to get a hold of more human species. I think that's why she's been hinting that she wants me to go to human world."

"It looks like that's worked. You're here, aren't you?" The hair on the back of Kurama's neck stood up as a breeze blew through his open window. He made a note to get some darker curtains.

"She plants vegetables."

"Vegetables? In the demon world climate, I don't know of many that would do very well." Kurama threaded his fingers through his hair.

"She gets around it, somehow."

"What do you mean?"

"I don't know why she bothers; she doesn't eat anything but humans, anyway." In the dim lighting, the large round lump Hiei drew from his coat looked like a water balloon.

"My goodness Hiei, that is the most beautiful tomato I have ever seen. You stole it, didn't you?"

"I'm debating whether or not I should eat it here, or in front of her."


	4. Camera

Yukina learned about loneliness the second month of her stay in the Kuwabara household.

"Don't worry about a thing Yukina-san, I'll be back in a jiffy."

Kazuma's favorite photo of Eikichi was taken when he picked up the kitten from the pound. "Are you sure you don't want to come with me?"

Eikichi was a "feisty" one, as Kazuma said, and he had scratched his new owner as soon as Kazuma had picked him up.

"No, it's all right. Don't worry about me, and take your time."

Eikichi's mother had been run over by a car when Eikichi was a month old.

"You heard her, bro. Go on, have fun."

Even though Eikichi's claws were small, they left a considerably deep scratch on Kazuma's face. If Yukina leaned in closely, she could still see the marks.

"Aw, what's the rush? I could stay a little—crap, the train!"

Shizura had teased Kazuma and warned against adopting such a vicious kitten, but Kazuma had fallen in love and insisted on the little creature.

"See ya, bro."

The kitten continued to hiss and wriggled, but Kazuma only held on patiently and calmly.

"Good-bye, Kazuma."

After deciding on a name, Kazuma slipped the collar on the kitten's neck and declared him, "Eikichi."

"Bye, Yukina-san! And don't mess with my room while I'm gone, sis!"

Eikichi turned his claws to the collar instead, and after scratching at it for a few seconds, seemed to accept his fate.

"Bye."

A drop of blood from Kazuma's scratched cheeks dripped onto Eikichi's fur. Kazuma, who could not bear the sight of Eikichi's fur dirty, tried to wipe away the offending splotch.

"It's hard to believe he's going to college already. He might be visiting now, but he'll be attending come September."

Eikichi swatted away Kazuma's hands and saw the red gashes on his face.

"It's so far away. Where will he live?"

Without any trace of guilt or responsibility, Eikichi lapped away at Kazuma's cheeks.

"We'll be looking at apartments next month, though he says he can't stand the thought of being away from you, Yukina."

Shizuru, with a keen sense of aesthetics, snapped a picture with her camera and framed it.

"I can't, either."


	5. Mantis

It was always an adventure tracking down Hiei in the Demon Plane. While the Moving Centipede Fortress was impossible to mistake on sight, the huge mechanical insect moved with surprising stealth and never stayed in one place for longer than a day. Kurama had to dedicate his entire weekend to traveling through the portal and locating his short best friend.

Kurama was one of the few guests who were allowed to walk freely through the fortress without a guide. The lord of the fortress herself greeted him when he entered. Kurama felt on edge whenever he was around Mukuro, whose menace and grace reminded him of a praying mantis.

"Afternoon, Kurama. Hiei is out on an errand and will be back in half an hour. Make yourself at home, and feel free to tidy up his room while you're there."

"Thank you, Mukuro." Hiei had asked Kurama not to address her with an honorific, complaining that she was egotistical enough. She seemed not to mind.

As Mukuro walked away and Kurama relaxed his nerves, he took note of her odd gait, which seemed distinctively lighter than during the tournament.


	6. Witchcraft

Maya's unlucky number was fourteen. She received a parking ticket on the fourteenth of every month the first year she got her driver's license, she drew the number fourteen when she went to meet her first boyfriend at a restaurant he hadn't had the courtesy to make reservations for, only to have him break up with her, and she lost her memory of the night she turned fourteen. By all rights, Maya should have known something would go wrong when the only apartment within her price range left was apartment fourteen on the third floor, but poor college students have endured worse than live in an unlucky apartment, and besides, Yamanaka-san, her landlady, reminded her of her grandma.

Maya's first impression of the apartment was that it could have been worse. The living room was furnished with a white sofa with yellow stains on the bottom, but the original white color had faded so much that who was to say that yellow wasn't the original color? The refrigerator had three shelves with only one missing hinge, and the freezer came with two dark blue ice cube trays. The kitchen was practically sized: While working at the stove, Maya only had to make a half-circle turn to put dirty pots and pans in the sink. A quarter turn, and she had a work surface. Her bedroom was carpeted a blend of colors similar to her sofa and had a desk in the corner, complete with a lamp. Next to her room was a completely empty room, which she hoped would belong to a roommate, soon. The bathroom was the best room in the apartment. The tub, though rusty at the bottom, was clean, with a showerhead at the top and a workable dial, and the mirror had no cracks, and the toilet was impeccable, and the sink bowl was deep. Maya, who had never had very high standards for bathrooms, would have forgiven all of the faults of her apartment because of this wonderful lavatory, if not for the little pair of black antennae that she saw peeping out of the sink drawer.

It must be said that Maya was an avid lover of horror and the occult. She relished ghost stories and haunted houses and curses and witchcraft, though by no means was she a malevolent girl. As she explained to new acquaintances and the occasional policeman, she wanted to understand what society deemed phenomena or mystery or the forbidden, though this hobby of hers also caused her great pain because fantasy, once understood, became the mundane, and she would have to find something else to fascinate her. With this taken into account, friends loved to watch horror films with Maya. There was something comfortable about clinging onto her for dear life and hiding your eyes when someone was killed or something jumped into the screen from nowhere, and all she did was eat popcorn and watch intently. Maya never screamed, ducked, or hid her eyes.

But this time, she did scream, for she knew everything there was to know about cockroaches, that they lived forever, could survive atom bombs, ate everything and anything, reproduced by the hundreds, and if you found one, there were bound to be others.

Yamanaka came into the bathroom as quickly as an octogenarian could, and it didn't take her very long to compute why sweet and placid Maya was bashing the sink drawer with a most likely filthy toilet brush. She only stopped when she examined the brush and found the corpse of the roach skewered onto the fibers, still twitching slightly. Yamanaka assured Maya "That cockroach was the last of them; I hired an agency and had the whole building sprayed a week ago, and this one must have gotten away", but Maya told her landlady that she was having the bathroom cleaned regardless.

After seeing Maya move in her belongings and wrenching her back in the process, Yamanaka on her laying down while the older woman prepared tea. Although Maya protested, saying that she had no tea bags, Yamanaka-san demonstrated an unusually strong grip for a woman her age and forced Maya onto the couch before striding into the kitchen and, almost instantaneously, bringing a tea kettle and two mugs on a tray.

"Here you go. Now, you just relax while I explain a few things to you. I know you might not be very happy with this apartment."

"Oh no, I—"

"Careful, dear, don't spill it. But I have a very good reason for giving you this one, and not the one you wanted, number nineteen, right down the hall, and that is, and don't laugh at a senile old lady like me for saying so, that apartment… is haunted."

"As long as it isn't haunted by the ghosts of the cockroaches you exterminated" is what Maya would have said if she hadn't been drinking tea at the moment, but she was, and she ended up choking and spilling it all down her shirt.

"Oh dear, I warned you not to spill it. And you're wearing a nice, white shirt, too."

Maya ineffectively tried to wipe away the stain with her hands. "Oh, it's all right, this is an old shirt, anyway. But please, go on. Are you sure it's a haunting?"

"Yes, I'm afraid so. A nasty haunting, I haven't seen a case like it in my entire life. And that's a long time." Maya nodded. "The last tenant was very much like yourself, a young college student looking for an economical first home away from home. She begged me for the cheapest apartment I had, but I told her it was no good. She insisted, saying she wasn't afraid of ghosts. She lasted one semester before she couldn't take it anymore and left. When I told you this apartment was the only one you could afford, I was lying. But I saw that you were a very sweet girl, I wouldn't dare make the same mistake twice."

The little old lady, who had seem so strong a few moment ago, was suddenly on the verge of tears, yet the first thing Maya wanted to do was interrogate her. But Maya had some sense of propriety and wrapped her arm around Yamanaka's shoulders instead. "I'm very sorry."

"Oh, don't apologize. You have nothing to apologize about."

Unsure of how to answer to that, Maya settled for offering Yamanaka-san her mug of tea. "Yamanaka-san," she said, when the older woman had calmed down, "What are you going to do with that apartment?"

"I've allowed someone to take residence in it." Maya felt a surge of jealousy and beat it down. "He says he has some experience in the supernatural and says he'll be able to take care of the problem, and something about him makes me believe it. He'll be your neighbor, so you'll see him around. You're interested in that, aren't you, dear? Maybe you can ask him."

"Oh, I will." Maya, who took fierce pride in her sixth sense, cursed the number fourteen and this lucky and yet unlucky man who dared to take her (now realized) dream apartment away from her. "Will you tell me his name, Yamanaka-san, so I can address him correctly when I see him?"

"Certainly, Maya." Maya poured in more tea for the lady, who had quickly emptied her cup. "His name is—oh, someone's knocking. We mustn't keep them waiting."

It took Maya ten seconds to register that Ohsomeonesknocking was not a name before she answered the door, hoping that whoever it was had something very important to say.

"Hello, Kitajima-san. I'm very sorry to interrupt you. I'm Minamino Shuichi. I live in apartment nineteen, just down the hall, and I have unfortunately run out of toilet paper."

Very important.


	7. Couch

The first time Yusuke told Keiko he needed to have two girls and two boys, she blushed and slapped him on the thigh, mostly because he told her while they were eating lunch with Kuwabara and Yukina. The second time he told her, they were in bed, and he was watching news while she was reading. She thought it was an odd form of foreplay, and was disappointed when he responded to her kiss on the cheek by turning off the TV and the lights, and setting a deadline: "Before I'm dead". He was completely clueless when she stomped off and slept on the couch, and told her so when he joined her (he had no choice, because she took his favorite blanket).

He explained that it was something stupid that a wandering ghost made him promise, and she was only a kid, so she didn't really know what she talking about, but two girls and two boys always sounded like a good number to him, not too many, not too few, and enough of each gender, and he promised to always have sex with her, no matter how stretchy her vagina got. It was the most terrible foreplay Keiko had ever heard from him, but damn it, she was horny and he was talking way too much.

The third time Yusuke told Keiko he needed to have two girls and two boys, she had resigned herself to that number and told him that he was the one who bought the condoms and she knew how forgetful he could be. He took that for a yes and asked if she wanted to try for the first one right then and there, since she was ovulating and all, which was when Hiei set Yusuke's shirt on fire and Mukuro scolded him for being rude to their guests.


	8. Lights

For Yusuke, each tournament is like making his bed: he only does it to be neat and because Keiko nags him to. It was his idea, and he should carry it out, she says. And it gives him an excuse to brawl, so why is he complaining?

For her information, it wasn't his idea to wear a freaking suit to the opening ceremonies. That was all her, thank you very much. It's boiling outside, too.

She fixes his tie and thinks to herself only Yusuke would need his girlfriend to teach him how to tie a tie. Only Yusuke would continue this "election" for years and years without complaining to anyone but her.

She thinks he's getting tired of it, but do demons really get tired? His eyes are still fresh, his skin still smooth, and he looks as vibrant as a feral beast in her withered eyes.

He thinks his tie is straighter than an arrow now, and she can stop touching it. Before he can make a juvenile Freudian remark, she fixes his hair. He still refuses to use conditioner, and yet never gets split ends.

She's not his mom, he says.

No, Atsuko is long gone now. But Keiko, who has always been his home, is now more of a mother to him than a lover. She insists on separate beds in their home, in order to be closer to the children in case anything went wrong, which was absolutely ridiculous because if anything went wrong, he would be the first to know, and what could she do anyway? Then the children grew and left, and he couldn't bring himself to ask her about coming back, because she had made a habit of coming into his room after dinner, where they would watch the news, or she would read a book, or they would talk, and maybe, every so often, make love. Then she would get up and sleep in her room. Anything more than a gentle kiss became rare after she turned thirty-five, still beautiful and desirable to him, when they were brushing their teeth in the bathroom. She looked up and compared their reflections and wondered aloud if her teeth were yellowing.

When he turned fifty-five, he had her pinned beneath him when she outright refused. She was tired. He said it didn't matter, since he was going to do all the work anyway. She was ugly. It didn't matter, because he was going to turn off the lights. She gave in, and afterwards, she went downstairs to the kitchen to cry.

"Yusuke."

He meets her eyes.

"Don't lose."

He kisses her before she can leave.


	9. Landfill

Landfill

Jin and Touya didn't consider themselves close friends, or ever friends at all, until the Dark Tournament. They were companions and comrades, and they fought for and with each other, but that was what you did when you were shinobi. Touya preferred to spend his time with Gama, who he considered an intellectual equal capable of producing decent conversation, while Jin roamed the skies in his leisure, far away from troublesome teammates who were either too stupid or too serious to take a joke. However the two felt about Risho and "the big idiot", Jin and Touya knew only one life and would do anything to preserve it.

Then they fought against Team Urameshi in the Dark Tournament, and five were down to two.

Touya, never talkative, found that he couldn't stand silence, and Jin, always a laze-about, suddenly found a goal. If asked whose idea it was to rent an apartment in downtown Tokyo, neither could say.

"The view's not bad."

"Jin, we're on the twentieth story."

"It'd be better if that building weren't so tall. Maybe I could take off the top five levels. The humans won't miss 'em. Eyesores."

Jin claimed the couch for himself the day they picked out the furniture. Touya resigned himself to the armchair and tried to ignore the personality metaphors.

"Did you check the mail?"

"Damn, I forgot. I'll go get it."

"Don't bother, I already did." Jin would have seen that if he had bothered to look at the coffee table instead of staring out the window. "Your father sent you a letter," he said, fishing out an envelope.

"Not again!" He threw his arm over his eyes. "Do me a favor and get rid of it. Or recycle it, whatever."

"I took the liberty of reading it."

"Of course you did."

"He isn't happy that you're taking money from the family account to splurge in the human world."

"Of course he isn't."

"He wants you home right away. And your mother, too." He waited for an answer, and when he found that he would get none, continued, "How does your father even know we're here?"

"Lousy ninjas we are, eh? He's got familiars everywhere. And he may complain, but I only take enough for half of what we need. The other half he sends himself."

"Why would he do that?"

"He can't make his mind up. Half of him wants me to be a good boy and go home, and the other half is as curious about human world as I am. And Mum just hates being alone with Dad."

Touya took the letter out of the envelope and laid it on the coffee table. As he left to prepare dinner, he saw Jin read it from the corner of his eye.

"You've got dinner duty tomorrow, Jin."

"I thought I had laundry."

"Not with the job you did yesterday. Horrendous. The manager of the laundromat posted a picture of your face on its doors, banning you."

"It wasn't that bad." He jumped up and in a quick hop, floated to the kitchen and stood behind Touya. "Pleeease, Touya, don't make me eat my own cooking. You wouldn't want anything to happen to me, would you? I can't even boil water."

The remains of the pot that Jin used were still smoking at the bottom of a landfill.

"Fine. But my pants better be spotless."


End file.
